Wow, what an impressive game for the web browser, and in such a small size!
I'm particularly impressed by the variable lighting of the bullets down hallways, that's really quite masterful work.
Kudos!
Edit: I am impressed because I'm impressed. I spent a few weekends recently messing around with pygame, and I had a really hard time organizing my code and my thoughts. I do primarily numerical, technical work, and I see that there is something challenging about writing a game that I haven't come across much in 25+ years.
Feel free to shit on my comment, but I still think it's a very cool project, and seeing it run so smooth in a web browser, in a vm, on a beat up box with a Celeron was surreal to me.
Ok, I'm not trying to take anything away from the developer here but calling this "masterful" makes me think you must have incredibly low expectations for webtech games and/or developers.
Or incredibly low expectations for programmers in general, which is fair. If you pick 100 random run-of-the-mill programmers from any corporation, and ask them to repeat this exercise, 95 of them would not even get out of the starting blocks. I liked it.
In my experience, those that are actually the smartest are also down-to-earth and approachable -- the sort that you can have very interesting, thoughtful conversations with and enjoy being around.
I suspect folks who had bad experiences with a "smart" person might have been dealing with someone who was a "big fish in a small pond", who hadn't been sufficiently humbled by going to (or trying to go to, haha) a more appropriately challenging level of education or professional practice.
So generally, I think the difference is that truly smart and knowledgeable people have serious respect for the vast body of knowledge they haven't acquired.
To piggyback on this, some of the people I've worked with in the past that could be called "smartest" are people with a natural aptitude for explaining things.
I've definitely met people who hadn't been humbled by life yet, and they're not too grating imo to deal with, provided they have good social skills and work ethic.
But there are those who innately understand that a lot of software team communication is about conveying an idea that is potentially unfamiliar to someone, and cooperating with them. I remember the first time someone showed me how to use Makefiles. I had seen them, I comprehended their usage, but when I was shown how easy it is to actually form them and use them for different purposes, it was incredibly eye-opening. That conversation couldn't have been but 7-8mins. That man was actually my boss for a while later on, before he had a bad car accident. Another example might be my old mentor who helped me grok syntax-rules for the first time, over a lunch break, with a pen and paper. It just clicked, and I learned.
My point is, the combination of social skills + intelligent explanations + teaching practice is a powerful one.
Maybe it sounded a bit elitist. I myself am not a game programmer, and I would indeed be among the 95 struggling to get out of the starting blocks. I do like low-level stuff, however, and I choose to be impressed by projects like this!
I don't feel I am being rude or dismissive. I have nothing negative to say about this project or its results. I just find the idea of calling a relatively simple bit of lighting "masterful" very strange. It'd be a bit like someone looking at something I have written, like a serialization routine, and saying that my use of bitshifting and masking was "masterful". That kind of thing is very basic for the domain.
Boring demos are available anywhere you care to search. https://playcanvas.com/explore is the typical goto for this kind of 3d market these days. Particularly popular in the mobile OS and web game (e.g. facebook) space. Robostorm, seemore, and After The Flood are their demos.
Unity and Unreal can both export large games to the Web just fine but people found out they didn't want to serve 50 GB games to a temporary client.
"Turing machines can all do the same calculations. This is a novel and worthwhile thing to complain about on Hacker News that no one has ever heard before."
I know, but that wasn't the question, rather what has been actually produced with it, given that Infinity Blade was created with Unreal 3 for iOS in 2008.
An hardware that WebGL 2.0 is supposed to be much better.
Instead most online games look like Amiga 500 stuff instead.
This is more because there isn't an incentive (monetary or otherwise) to do that. When Flash gaming was big, web-based games were on the desktop but web games never took off on mobile which got pretty much all the audience they used to have on the desktop. Instead mobile games are largely native (or at least in app form).
I agree that it took many years for HTML5/JS to reach Flash's capabilities (and some stuff like easily swapping around SWF files is still not as easy to do) and i dislike how Flash was forcibly killed instead of losing its popularity "naturally" (though it being proprietary technology instead of some open standard or at least an open source project help its murder considerably), but the reason you do not see Citadel-level stuff on HTML5/JS has more to do with not being much of an incentive to do something like that than the technology being able or not (demos like After the Flood[0], which has as much gameplay as Citadel yet it shows more advanced rendering techniques - you can even look yourself in the glass reflections :-P - show that it is technically possible).
Citadel is from 2011, but this doesn't matter, the point is that you can do stuff like that on the web.
> doesn't work on my Vulkan aware mobile GPU
If the GPU is Vulkan aware then it might be an issue with your browser, though from [0] it looks like only Apple's devices do not support it - which wouldn't support Vulkan either, so i'm not sure why you'd bring that up.
Webgames are generally more about free to play and accessibility. No install or trust required. They are usually more casual games and must work on the widest possible selection of devices.
That's what WebGL is all about. If your looking for a memory intensive behemoth of a game, it makes more sense to look at native as opposed to WebGL. There's nothing wrong with either approach, but the web lends itself to one more than the other.
And then everyone went to mobile native games instead, leaving WebGL behind for 3D visualizations of online shops, Google maps and shader toy demos, basically.
Literally every major engine allows exporting to WebGL/WASM. So Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc... graphics can all be done in WebGL (without a few of the bleeding edge Vulkan/DirectX features).
A few of the bleeding edge features ? You obviously don't know what you're talking about - WebGL 2.0 is not supported on Safari and iOS [1] and WebGL 1.0 is based on an API that was released in 2007 ! Even WebGL 2.0 is based on ES 3.0 which is from 2008...
Safari is already shipping experimental support for WebGL 2. It will be months, not years, before it is enabled by default.
Also, OpenGL ES 3.0 is not from 2008. The specification was publicly released in August 2012, and of course it took years before enough devices supported it well enough (lots of driver bugs…) for it to be worth targeting.
The web is certainly a few years behind the native-code state-of-the-art, but it's not a decade behind. There's a lot you can do with these mature APIs.
>It will be months, not years, before it is enabled by default.
So in a few months we'll have feature parity with 2012 mobile HW ?
I have quit 3D development around 2015 but I remember trying to use MRT on webgl to do some basic deferred shading and you could run on FF and Chrome desktop only. It's infuriating that 7 years later it's still the case. I used this technique when I was learning 3D programming in 2007. Calling this cutting edge is just...
It is definitely a real tragedy WebGL 2 didn't ship sooner, for sure. I want to underscore though that at least when it does ship, it will actually work on almost all devices out there, rather than being limited to desktops and high-end mobile devices. (And yeah MRT is not remotely cutting-edge. It might have been a decade ago on mobile, but mobile GPUs have caught up a lot in that time.)
Agreed, iOS 15 is finally going to make hundreds of millions of iPhones to be able to access 3D experiences on the web at good performance.
Shameless plug, but our startup is building better support for Unreal developers to target WebGL2, and we're working towards WebGPU support. We're offering an end-to-end ecosystem that includes our SDK for optimizing games/3D apps, which includes compression, an asset streamer tool, and networking libraries for the web. This goes hand in hand with our hosting platform where developers can deploy their projects to without having to go through walled gardens. The best part is no 30% fees!
We're going to have some demos here pretty soon as we approach general availability of the platform. If you or any other devs reading this are interested, you can join our Discord community here:
And finally gets supported in Safari, on the year when graphics card are moving into mesh shaders and raytracing, with WebGPU still one year away as MVP 1.0.
Who cares about Apple? They intentionally don't implement open standards to keep their users boxed in. While they have decent market share in a few select countries, they don't matter to most of the world...
(It was a js13kgames submission in 2018; I’m guessing that this being submitted here now is in some way linked to how Q1K3 is currently on the homepage, also a js13kgames submission, though for 2021. Pure speculation.)
• There’s an & that should be either & or &, depending on whether it’s setting HTML or text.
• The opening garbage text is mojibaked, so that it looks like… different, not as æsthetically pleasing garbage.
• The text that’s supposed to be like “7 SYSTEM(S) STILL OFFLINE” is getting mangled badly, missing much of the string and getting a bunch of U+0000s in it—unchecked and incorrect string indexing, by the looks of it. Hmm… “1␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀␀STIL1␀␀␀␀␀␀␀” actually looks like something’s clobbering the string literal stillOffline. Ouch; that actually worries me, though I hope it’s largely just a side-effect of some shortcuts taken to keep the code tiny and not something that would normally be an issue?
• terminal_text_outro has some double quotes that should be single quotes (apostrophes).
For what it's worth, the original 13kb JS only version[1] does not have these problems.
I was confused for a second why this game made its way to HN again (there's a making of for the game itself from 2018[2]). This seems to be a port of the game to D[3] as a demo for a WASM runtime, Spasm, which is also written in D[4].
Pretty impressive performance. It seems web assembly is pretty good tech for writing a performant web app. Is there any benchmark comparing web assembly vs javascript? I mean the same logic executed by javascript code vs the web assembly.
Also curious to know if there are any serious web apps developed using web assembly.
Figma uses webassembly. We also use it for our web engine at https://castle.xyz, I gave at talk about that you can watch here: https://youtu.be/0FjCaoc1uzs where I go into some details and also do some live wasm game development (not sure how "serious" since we're still working on our app though).
Much, much better performance than JS is possible because (among many other things) you can perform a lot of optimizations during AOT compilation due to eg. LLVM, avoid GC and arrange memory to help cache efficiency.
Re: JS call overhead, ultimately using instanced drawing so you have a constant number of draw calls even for a growing number of objects is what helps.
Thank you! We also have a Discord server (link at bottom of website) -- the app is rough around the edges still and some support / inspiration usually helps.
I compared it casually with the original JavaScript implementation: in both Firefox and Chrome, both JS and WASM hit max FPS easily (165, in my case, incidentally). According to Firefox’s profiler, the JS version experiences noticeably more frequent jank; Chrome’s profiler doesn’t obviously show any jank for either. In Firefox, both are around 50% idle and there’s no obvious difference in their performance, though they definitely have different hot spots. In Chromium, indications suggest the WASM is being a few percent more efficient, spending 68–70% idle versus JS’s 65–66%; it spends much less time in scripting (~17% vs. ~22–23%), but more in rendering, painting and “system” (whatever that is) which make up the balance of that 100%.
These results are utterly unscientific. You also can’t compare Firefox and Chrome’s profiling numbers to one another.
I don't think you say much about the performance here except that it isn't noticeably terrible. Any modern computer should be expected to run this kind of thing with a smooth framerate using paltry resources. I would expect this even if this had been written directly in javascript.
My understanding is WASM is pretty performant except in the case when it needs to interact with browser apis / js where is preforms quite a bit worse than JS.
I recently discovered https://lekh.app which uses web assembly. I had a conversation with the developer and he told me that he is using web assembly for the core diagramming and shape recognition logic. The app is for diagramming and whiteboarding.
The whole diagramming and AI (to recognize shapes) is compiled into ~1M of web assembly.
I am the developer of https://lekh.app When I first experimented with the web assembly, it was kind of magic for me. I had a diagramming app called Lekh Diagram (https://lekh.app/diagram.html). The core logic was written in C++ and is being used in Android and iOS apps. I wanted to make a collaborative web version of the app. Initially I thought I would have to rewrite everything in Javascript. But when I first tried to compile all the c++ code into web assembly, it was around 4M of web assembly. And the performance was awesome. I was pretty satisfied with 4M. Then I started developing the Lekh Board (web version of the diagramming app). Later in the development phase, I realized there is a flag which I can pass to reduce the size further. Then I got the web assembly size ~1M.
They’re not the best metrics but the related Spasm toolkit had surprisingly many stars and forks for being D. This was the more interesting tool I discovered here, rather than the JS game port to D, where honestly the impressive part is already done in JS.
> had surprisingly many stars and forks for being D.
Github stars are an extremely weak signal. Some D users have actually said to me that they feel slightly confused that their projects have more stars than the actual language implementation on github just because of hype, for example.
Maybe it could be, but our goal is not to have "niches". If anything, our niche is making people who would otherwise not be, productive enough to deliver what they want to make.
D isn't a gimmick language, it's a Programming (with a capital P!) language.
After finishing the game, there is the following message:
> SENT: SEP. 13, 2018
> RCVD: SEP. 13, 2718
>
> THANKS FOR PLAYING
>
> I HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN A PROUD SPONSOR OF THE JS13K
> COMPETITION SINCE THE VERY FIRST ONE BACK IN 2012.
> HOWEVER, THIS YEAR"S COMPETITION WAS MY FIRST ONE
> AS A PARTICIPANT AND IT HAS BEEN TREMENDOUS FUN!
>
> I WANT TO THANK MY DEAR FRIEND ANDREAS LÖSCH OF
> NO-FATE.NET FOR COMPOSING SOME AWESOME MUSIC ON
> SUCH SHORT NOTICE.
>
> FURTHER THANKS GO OUT TO THE JS13K STAFF, THE
> SONANT-X DEVELOPERS AND ALL OTHER PARTICIPANTS
> IN THIS YEAR"S JS13K. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!
>
> DOMINIC
> END OF TRANSMISSION
I appreciate the quality of the art given that this is presented (at least partially) as a tech demo! Oftentimes you don't get both; it's refreshing to see
Say if you increased the resolution here to become significantly less blocky, would it work with browsers in general or would it consume considerable amount of CPU?
This is really amazing work, super impressed with such a small size, gameplay mechanics, and how smooth it works. Bullet animations are super impressive.
I did D including a custom runtime in about +20 KB of webassembly over this (I just wanted to take a straight desktop program and port it over). The runtime doesn't have to be that big.
I'm particularly impressed by the variable lighting of the bullets down hallways, that's really quite masterful work.
Kudos!
Edit: I am impressed because I'm impressed. I spent a few weekends recently messing around with pygame, and I had a really hard time organizing my code and my thoughts. I do primarily numerical, technical work, and I see that there is something challenging about writing a game that I haven't come across much in 25+ years.
Feel free to shit on my comment, but I still think it's a very cool project, and seeing it run so smooth in a web browser, in a vm, on a beat up box with a Celeron was surreal to me.